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Industry standards for Li-ion batteries in the works

Laptop heavyweights Dell, Lenovo, Apple, and HP are among the companies …

Are you tired of proprietary laptop batteries that will only fit one brand or model of machine? Sick of exploding batteries, melted laptops, and burned leg hairs? By this time next year, all your troubles may be a distant memory. IPC - Association Connecting Electronics Industries (henceforth simply IPC) formed an OEM Critical Compoments Committee last October to come up with industry standards for essential computer parts, and laptop batteries are up next on that committee's hit list.

By July 2007, the group intends to have completed a Lithium-ion battery standard for laptops and handheld devices, including safety specifications that would prevent any further issues like the recent Sony and Dell troubles with overheating batteries. The task force includes senior managers from Dell, HP, Apple, and Lenovo, all of whom have an obvious interest in safe laptops. Other companies represented include IBM and Motorola, both of whom might know a thing or two about battery technologies, as well as Lucent, Intel, and Cisco. There's no shortage of name recognition here.

So far, the committee has produced a standard for fans in consumer electronics, and is working on specifications for power conversion components. Potential targets after that could be cables, heatsinks, or connectors, for example. The standards produced are more than simple design specifications, but also include process control and manufacturing parameters. Previous standards have either been imposed by bodies like IEEE and ANSI, or simply grown into de facto standards after a single manufacturer or a small group of companies have popularized them. The IPC committee is arguably the first attempt to bring most of the major stakeholders together to work out the next steps in computer architecture together.

Widely accepted standards tend to be a good thing. Proper guidelines ensure safer products because there's no need for each company to reinvent the wheel with all the possible missteps and risks that involves. When manufacturing is standardized, there will also be common tools for all the producers to use, which drives down manufacturing costs. And I haven't even mentioned the benefits of picking up quality third-party components rather than having to rely on cheap knockoffs—that may not get every detail right—or expensive proprietary parts.

So next year, our portable devices should come with batteries that are cheaper, generally safer, and probably interchangeable. Speaking as a guy who once had to trash a PDA because nobody makes replacement batteries for that model anymore, I can only call that a great development.